If you’re arrested in America for a minor charge — say, for speeding or loitering — the punishment from the legal system might end up being the least of your worries. You might wake up a few months later and see your arrest, filmed through a police body camera, with a million views on TikTok or YouTube. A few days later, it might have 5 million views, or 20 million. Your face would be next to dozens of other faces of the recently arrested, all on monetized, for-profit social media channels. And it would be almost impossible to get the videos taken down.
Like so much of the algorithm-driven internet, this particular subsection can be easy to miss. But it’s massive. A popular YouTube channel like Code Blue Cam averages over 10 million views a video, and has totaled more than a billion across hundreds of videos. Another, Midwest Safety, has totaled over 1.5 billion views. There are dozens like this, all with similar names: “Body Cam Watch,” “PoliceActivity,” “EWU Bodycam.” At least one channel is represented by an agency that represents more traditional influencers.
These channels are now well-known enough that recent arrestees have posted specifically about the fear of ending up on these channels. “I literally have panic attacks about this,” one posted on Reddit. “If my video was released I’d go off the deep end.” Another: “I feel like it will not only affect my chances of getting into a good career, but that millions of people would see me acting like a drunken idiot.”
Each channel gets its content from the same basic model: Someone uses public records requests to obtain video from police arrests, lightly edits the video, adding maybe a brief AI narration or captions, and then hits “publish.” Many videos take the same shape: somebody drunk or otherwise intoxicated yelling, speeding, throwing things, hitting cops; that person being arrested while crying, screaming, spitting, and so on. That said, there are videos of people being arrested for just about anything, from shoplifting to murder and kidnapping cases.
The faces of the people who are arrested are almost never blurred, and, depending on the channel and state of the footage, bystanders’ or family members’ faces often aren’t blurred either. Some channels give judicial outcomes, others don’t. Some have full names of those arrested, others redact. There’s little rhyme or reason. Even videos of cases of alleged child abuse feature entirely unblurred children as they’re questioned by police about their father, whose full name is given. And, of course, at the time of their arrest, none of these people have been convicted of a crime.
In a world where civilians make TikToks about embarrassing conversations they overheard on the train, it’s easy to argue that people deserve their privacy. But in this case, granting it might come with a cost. Access to video involving police, who can and do commit misconduct and crimes, has a real value to journalists and to the public. It’s difficult to know how to balance immense and cruel public embarrassment with the right of the public to monitor law enforcement.
This phenomenon of YouTube body camera channels illuminates multiple strange trends in American life: the public becoming the hyperpublic, the use and misuse of public records laws, and every last bit of government policy becoming warped for somebody somewhere to make a buck. The story of how this niche industry popped up and what it means takes us through the influencer industry, public records laws, and the long history of Americans enjoying video of people getting handcuffs slapped on them.
A new, endless supply of public domain content
Body-worn cameras have had a remarkably rapid uptake by police. The first US pilot programs began in 2012, but their popularity surged after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, when the Obama administration authorized $75 million in funding for local police departments to buy and deploy these cameras.
The cameras have enjoyed high support among the public over the years, sometimes exceeding 90 percent. Between 2022 and 2023, over 80 percent of local police officers reportedly wore cameras.
This creates a nearly endless supply of footage, which can be obtained through state transparency and open-records laws. But the people requesting the most usually aren’t on a crusade for justice. They are interested in having footage of someone’s shoplifting arrest rack up millions of views for profit.
Every state has its own laws regarding public access to body camera footage, and the specific application and interpretation of each of those laws is the subject of frequent litigation between news organizations and police departments. Trying to get a video that shows potential police misconduct? Even if you file an open records request, if there’s a chance the video shows police behaving badly, departments claim various exemptions (around active investigations, for instance) and drag their feet. (The same dynamic occurs at the federal level.)
According to a ProPublica investigation, “departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all.” That’s one reason police reformers have long been skeptical of the utility of transparency alone, and studies showed that cameras resulted in muddled effects at best, whether in reducing police misconduct or in better uncovering it after the fact.
But whatever the aggregate statistics show, there clearly are individual cases of misconduct being uncovered via open records requests. Traditional media use the same public records laws in their reporting, which certainly does uncover misconduct and generally inform the public.
Cases of county sheriffs drinking and driving, questionable shootings by officers, and other cases of potential misconduct appear on some of these body cam channels.
Yet on these channels, videos of possible police misconduct are dwarfed by lurid arrests for often minor charges. Police departments won’t resist public records requests that merely show ordinary citizens being embarrassed and officers in a sympathetic light. And an average YouTube viewer probably prefers to be titillated rather than depressed by police violence. So while you wait for videos of abusive police behavior, in the meantime, you can get footage for videos like “Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired” or “Drunk 18-Year-Old Girl Completely Loses It During Arrest” or “Woman Sets Porta Potty On Fire Because She Doesn’t Like It.”
Gawking at arrestees, from Mugshots.com to CodeBlueCam
Humiliating the arrested via government disclosure has a long history in the United States. “Publish-for-pay” websites acquire mugshots through public records, post them with name and arrest information, and then require payment to remove them. Numerous states have tried to either restrict the release of mugshots or require sites to remove them for free if requested, but it remains a live problem, and reforms have been undone in the name of being tough on crime. Plenty more sites publish tens of thousands of mugshots with no option for removal, presumably just for ad revenue.
Any sufficiently old reader will remember “mugshot galleries,” a staple of many even legitimate news outlets because they were reliable generators of user clicks through endless slideshows. Most newsrooms have drastically scaled back the use of mugshots, especially since the murder of George Floyd, but they’re still widespread online, with multiple cottage industries selling services to remove them, suppress them via Google search result alterations, and so on.
Beyond photos, Cops, the 1990s television staple that ran until 2020, is a remarkably similar format to modern body cam channels, with footage of arrests with no narrator or presenter, and at least the appearance of an unedited, cinema verite style. (In reality, police departments screened footage before it was ever broadcast and had final cut privileges.) It was a source of constant controversy for its endless depictions of people who are poor or have a mental illness as something to be gawked at. The podcast Running From Cops found numerous apparent misrepresentations on Cops, including “a young woman was denied a bail bond until she signed the form giving Cops permission to air her arrest for possession of cocaine.” According to the podcast, it was later determined it wasn’t cocaine, but that didn’t stop Cops from airing the episode as a rerun.
Running From Cops’s analysis also found that, compared to generic arrest statistics, Cops showed 10 times more arrests than you’d expect for sex work, probably for the sleazy reason you would guess. That pattern has continued on these body cam channels, where it is impossible not to notice just how many videos are of young women, sometimes with the single most revealing frame of the video being used as the thumbnail. Many of these same problems carry over to the body cam channels of today.
Police in general have to deal with the staggering number of records requests, which takes time and money even for the videos that merely show them doing their jobs. Each request can include multiple cameras taking hours of footage that needs to be reviewed and redacted by department staff. For example, one New Jersey town had over 1,500 requests in just the month of June, requiring more than 300 hours of work to review.
Faced with a deluge of requests for police footage, states like Ohio and Wisconsin have passed laws allowing police departments to charge fees to body cam requesters, which might seem like common sense — until you realize that highly lucrative channels would probably find it the easiest to pay, while local journalists and newspapers would find it the hardest.
“This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
— Adam Schwartz, Electronic Frontier Foundation
In general, states have not found solutions that provide both privacy and transparency, and reading through state legislature debates leaves one with whiplash. In Alabama, where body cam footage is not broadly accessible, footage of the death of an 18-year-old shot by police has been withheld for months. As a result, the state is debating legislation to require its release within 30 days. And in Rhode Island, watchdogs have questioned “inexplicable gaps” in footage of police shootings, 30 minutes of “missing audio” from footage of police cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other discrepancies that rely on loopholes in state law.
But in New Jersey, where footage is much easier to obtain, legislators have considered tightening the rules to require consent of the arrestee to publish footage. This came after a channel “only requested DWI stops involving young women, some being underage,” and, at least according to news reports, offered to remove one woman’s video only if she paid for its removal, an echo of mugshot extortion.
The dichotomy between potentially profound, even criminal, police misconduct and admittedly embarrassing but often harmless arrest footage understandably leads some to say we have to accept the release of the latter in order to get the former. That’s the conclusion of a thoughtful essay by Scott Gordon in Tone Madison, an independent and local news outfit in Wisconsin whose reporters’ abilities to do their jobs have been affected by the state’s imposition of fees for footage. He writes: “A YouTuber making a quick buck from these materials is, well, just the cost of having a modicum of transparency in our society.”
What does transparency without voyeurism look like?
Is there any kind of middle ground here?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was an early critic of body-worn cameras worn without safeguards. Their fear at the time (and today) was primarily of police misuse, through retention of footage, facial recognition technology, and other technologies allowing widespread state surveillance.
In an interview, EFF’s privacy litigation director Adam Schwartz laid out something close to first principles around release of footage that seem reasonable:
- If footage depicts a particular person, then that person must have access to it.
- If footage depicts police use of force, then all members of the general public must have access to it, without being charged an unreasonable fee.
- If a person seeks footage that does not depict them or use of force, then whether they may have access must depend on a weighing by a court of 1) the benefits of disclosure to police accountability, and 2) the costs of disclosure to the privacy of a depicted member of the public. If the footage does not depict police misconduct, then disclosure will rarely have a police accountability benefit.
- Blur civilian faces, with the exception of high-profile people.
As he said to me, “This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
These guidelines, while reasonable, would likely require more funding for police and court systems in order to be implemented properly. And even under these guidelines, a reasonably large number of videos would still wind up online. That’s because of just how many arrests, even for fairly minor crimes, involve police using force of some kind — whether a taser, pepper spray, less-lethal ammunition, or standard ammunition — without falling into misconduct. It’s also because these channels do in fact also publish content in the public interest.
What do the channels themselves say about all this? Alex Smith is the founder of Midwest Safety, one of the largest channels, and the only one I contacted that was willing to answer written questions on the record. Midwest Safety employs around 50 people, and Smith says they spend between eight and 80 hours per video, which explains their noticeably high production values. In defense of the channel, Smith cited multiple videos Midwest Safety published that show misconduct by law enforcement and those in a “position of trust” like a pastor. He also provided a description of their internal “right to be forgotten” policies, which depend on “severity of crime and the public interest in the incident.” He described internal rules that limit but do not prohibit, for instance, footage of self-harm or domestic violence.
Midwest Safety is likely the most responsible of these channels, and whatever thoughtfulness they have is not the norm. They were, for instance, the only channel I could find with any listed process for a video to be removed. And they also still publish videos like “Extreme Karen Goes Crazy on Fast Food Employees,” which primarily involves a woman sitting on a toilet in a women’s bathroom talking to police before being arrested.
Whatever one thinks of the right balance when it comes to police body cam footage, this problem seems unlikely to stay limited to arrest footage. Modern technology has mutated public access and transparency into a kind of hyperpublic. Consider courtrooms, a setting that almost anyone would think has to be open to the public. When Covid-19 shut down in-person courtrooms, some judges understandably opened their hearings to public YouTube streams for that very principle. But public to a person who is willing to physically go and sit in a courtroom and watch proceedings and public to anyone willing to open YouTube are so drastically different that they may as well be different words.
Predictably, some of those judges have clearly become enamored with their online audience. In Detroit, a judge chatted with YouTube commenters during cases, including during child sexual assault cases, until live chat while streaming was banned by a higher court. In Texas, defense attorneys have taken to printing cards to warn clients appearing before a particular judge that they’re being watched on livestream, because his honor has repeatedly gone viral for reprimanding defendants with lines like, “I will put you over my knee like a little child and I’m going to spank you.” Even if a judge would act like this without a camera, why does it need to be broadcast? Does the principle of public access to courtrooms really mean 9 million views for a hearing about a misdemeanor that required four hours of community service?
Defendants might need to be handed cards warning them they’re being filmed in court, but fear of YouTube arrest infamy is starting to become common knowledge, even for those as they’re being arrested. In one recent video, police are called to a Walmart due to a fire that they discover was actually arson. A 17-year-old girl, screwing around in an admittedly dangerous way, used a lighter on fake plants, which are very flammable.
No one was hurt, but the store’s merchandise was totaled for a $7.6 million loss. She ended up serving 60 days in jail and getting eight years of probation. In the video, the visibly distraught 17-year-old says, “I didn’t take my meds today,” “I’m really sorry,” “I thought it would just die out,” “I don’t want to kill myself,” in between weeping.
She then asks the officer, “Do you have a body camera? Oh, Jesus Christ, this is so embarrassing, is this going to be published to YouTube?” The officer responds, “No, no…” then corrects himself, “Well, I can’t promise that.”
It has over 6 million views in six months.
